In 1990, Ruth Levitas published her pathbreaking book The
Concept of Utopia, a work that helped to shape the emerging
field of utopian studies and inspired a generation of utopian
studies scholars. Twenty-three years later, she has published a
major new contribution to the field, Utopia as Method: The
Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Like its predecessor,
Utopia as Method is exceptionally well informed,
clearly and accessibly written, and deeply politically engaged. The
product of years of scholarly study and professional activity in
the fields of utopian studies and critical social thought, it is
also methodologically sophisticated and a reliable guide to some of
the most advanced current research on utopian social thought.

The central argument of Utopia as Method is that
utopia should be understood as a method and that as such it should
be recognized as intimately related to the discipline of sociology.
In the course of elaborating this thesis the analysis of the book
ranges quite widely, from its opening chapters—which reprise the
argument of The Concept of Utopia that utopia is the
expression of the desire for a better way of being or living and as
such is diffused throughout human culture—to part 2 of the book,
which traces the history of the relationship between utopia and
sociology from the institutionalization of the discipline to the
recent revival of interest in utopia in contemporary sociology.
Finally, in part 3 of the book, Levitas develops a line of analysis
that will be very familiar to those who have followed her work over
the years—namely, mapping the imaginary reconstitution of society
as a method that has three aspects: archaeological, ontological,
and architectural.

Original and engaging throughout, Utopia as Method
is particularly innovative and thought-provoking in its sustained
analysis of the evolving relationship between sociology and utopia.
Very unusually for a work written by a utopian scholar with an
abiding interest in William Morris, Marxism, and ecologism, this
aspect of the book originates in and is inspired throughout by the
ideas of one H. G. Wells. More specifically, Levitas develops
Wells’s argument that (and this is the opening quotation of the
book) “the creation of Utopias—and their exhaustive criticism—is
the proper and distinctive method of sociology” (xi).

In one sense, Wells’s 1906 lecture “The So-Called Science of
Sociology,” with its critical discussion of the emergent academic
discipline of sociology, seems an apt choice of starting point for
the argument developed in Utopia as Method. Like a
number of other emergent academic disciplines in the social
sciences in the nineteenth century, sociology sought to gain a
place in the European academies and universities by demonstrating
its respectability and disciplinary self-sufficiency. Importantly,
and the point is frequently forgotten today, it did so by
simultaneously distancing itself from the early literary forms of
the discipline and adopting a scientific orientation that led it to
imitate the methods of the natural sciences. As might be expected,
this process of transformation was fraught with intellectual
conflict, between, on the one hand, a literary intelligentsia
composed of authors and, on the other hand, a social-scientific
intelligentsia composed of self-professed “scientific”
sociologists.

In England, Wells’s 1906 lecture at the recently established
London School of Economics may be understood as a partisan
contribution to this ongoing conflict intended primarily to debunk
the scientific pretensions of the then fledgling science of
sociology. Typical of Wells, the lecture is from start to finish an
intellectual provocation, perhaps nowhere more so than in its
deliberately controversial claim that sociology must be neither art
simply nor science in the narrow meaning of the word but, rather,
“knowledge rendered imaginatively, and with an element of
personality; that is to say, in the highest sense of the term,
literature.”

Utopia as Method draws a great deal of intellectual
inspiration from Wells’s distinctive understanding of sociological
method and develops it in fascinating and unexpected directions. In
chapters 5 through 7, for example, Levitas traces the historical
development of sociology and the disavowal of its utopian dimension
that corresponded with its institutionalization as an academic
discipline. As she correctly points out, again following the
example of Wells, such a disavowal could...

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